Missed Again, Don Quixote

One time, I was getting impatient in an online discussion about the faith. My friend is a determined atheist, you see, with some self-professed Communist leanings, and he was railing against the Church once again.

Or at least, he thought he was railing against the Church.

See, here's the strange thing about being Catholic these days: Everyone outside of the Church is very certain they know exactly what the Catholic faith is and what the Church stands for. They can tell you about it, often at great length, and will do so quite willingly, quite often. But often they're completely, nakedly, incredibly wrong.

As Venerable Fulton Sheen once observed, "There are not 100 people who hate the Catholic Church; But there are millions who hate what they believe the Catholic Church to be."

And my friend was hating away at what he thought the Catholic Church to be. So I called him on it. I didn't dissect his claims, refute his facts, or really answer the challenge at all.

No. I called him "Don Quixote."

So much of the sound and fury against the Church and against the faith really is people tilting at windmills, charging ahead, all sound and fury, full of fire and a sense of righteousness, when they're missing the castle entirely and off in some farmer's field somewhere, trampling the crops as they grow.

I mean, don't get me wrong--there are real sins in the Church's past, and real evils that have needed to be faced, the clergy abuse scandal the easy and obvious example. But there are also a great many imaginary sins in the history books, a great deal of anti-Catholicism masquerading as fact or judicious historical analysis, and thank God, some non-Catholics have called people on it.